CIA 'black jail' interrogations were torture, European court rules

The US suffered a significant legal rebuff on Thursday after its use of "extraordinary
rendition" and interrogations in CIA black jails was condemned as "torture"
in a landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The ruling came in the case a German-Lebanese car salesman who was seeking compensation after being the victim of a mistaken "extraordinary rendition" in 2003 at the height of the CIA's campaign of abductions and interrogations after the September 11 attacks.

It was hailed by civil rights groups as an "historic ruling" that would serve as a warning to European governments and put renewed pressure on the United States to acknowledge it had committed torture in its policy of 'rendition'.

Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, described the 92-page judgment as a "key milestone" in the struggle to secure accountability for "human rights violations committed by the Bush administration."

The case of Khalid El-Masri caused an international outcry in May 2004 after he was dumped by US officials on a mountain road in Albania nearly six months after being wrongly arrested by Macedonian border guards as a suspected terrorist.

Mr Masri, 48, who shared a name with a wanted al-Qaeda suspect, alleged he was held incommunicado for 24 days in Macedonia before being handed over to the CIA who 'rendered' him to a secret prison in Afghanistan knows as the 'salt pit'.

The 17-member panel in Strasbourg found that Mr Masri's account had been established "beyond reasonable doubt", ruling that he had suffered both torture and inhumane and degrading treatment at the hands of the CIA and the Macedonia border guards.

The court heard that on Jan 23, 2004 Mr Masri was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to Macedonia's Skopje airport where he was handed over to the CIA.

He was "beaten severely" by masked men, stripped, "sodomised with an object" and placed in a "nappy" before being "forcibly tranquilised" and chained to the floor of a CIA-chartered Boeing-737 which flew him to Afghanistan.

Mr Masri was released in May 2004 after almost six months in captivity after going on two hunger strikes to demand to see a representative of the German government. Hair isotope analysis in 2005 supported his story, the court was told.

The US has never apologized to Mr Masri for his ill treatment, although in 2005 the German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had accepted that an "error" had been made in Mr Masri's case.

In 2007 the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA operatives whose names were discovered by the Spanish government in a separate investigation into the use of Spanish airports for rendition flights, however those warrants have never been enforced.

In 2006 Mr Masri attempted to seek redress in the US federal courts, but his case – like all other cases of post 9/11 torture and rendition - was summarily rejected on the grounds of preserving official secrets.

Lawyers from the New York-based civil rights groupwhich took Mr Masri's case to the European Court, hailed the judgment as "historic", saying it was the first time that court had formally recognized that the practice of "extraordinary rendition" amounted to torture.

"It is an historic ruling that puts the United States to shame for its failure to even acknowledge, let alone compensate, its torture victims," said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative.

"This is a country that prides itself in being a leader in the field of human rights and the rule of law and this is a judgment that unequivocally demonstrates that United States' moral standing in the world is severely diminished," she added.

The ruling also puts pressure on European governments to "fully account for their complicity" in the CIA's rendition program, added Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union which has also worked to seek legal redress for Mr Masri.

Barack Obama banned the CIA from using of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" just two days after his inauguration in 2008, however his administration has made no efforts to hold to account those responsible for torture in the Bush era.

The powerful US Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to vote on a 6,000-page report into the use of torture after September 11, however it remains unclear how much of its contents will ever be made available to the public.

The US has never formally commented on Mr Masri's case. A request for comment from the US State Department was not answered at the time of publication.